Archive for April, 2006

Here’s a little nugget I found on LinkedIn. Didn’t realize Chris is just 2 degrees away. No fluff, amazing!Summary:
I have started and/or managed several Business to Consumer Internet businesses. I have an MBA from USC.
I’m looking to meet anyone who had ideas how they can work with MySpace.com.Specialties:
Have been involved with Internet companies that have had an ad sales component for last 6 years.

Just saw this story coming across from Digg & Slashdot (thanks for the link, Vicente). Kalyan Verma took this picture of a bus which has a Firefox logo painted all over it 😀
The naysayers on slashdot are calling foul — probably they don’t know the photoshop too well. Here is the link

I just tried the new Yahoo Mail beta, which makes my FireFox 1.0.4 crash (consistently). Here are couple of screen captures.Crash screen Post-crash screen
Good thing is that they are able to detect that something did not work!

This post is timed for 1,2,3,4,5,6 which is the combination of time and date right now.
Simply read in the following order of date format hh:mm:ss MM/DD/YY, the time right now is 01:02:03 04/05/06Update:Just saw other people talking about it (Scoble and Boing Boing)

After seeing all sorts of grand ideas, I came out thinking after ETech 2006; small startups and going-to-be-next-big ideas executing on the forefront of technology. Mostly missing were large companies (except, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google) who are going to buy these startups in 2-3 years for at least 5X/10X their current valuations.
Big corporations always miss the opportunity initially but then they spend millions of dollars on acquisitions. Most of these young companies are backed by venture capital and are funded to the north of just $1m on an average. A recent report cites that median price of these acquisitions are somewhere between $50m. That’s whopping.
How can the big companies execute on the new ideas? Simple — play by the same book as VCs play. How?
1. Pick at least one fresh idea every month and invest a total of half-a-million dollars for the next 12 months on each one, nurturing the idea to a private beta. You can even code name these project as Project Jan06, Project Feb06, etc. 🙂
2. I’m 100% sure; at least one of them would either be bankrolled into a full product or rolled into a feature in the existing product line.
3. Analyze after 12 months and start at #1 again
Here is the worksheet:
12 ideas, $0.5m each = $6m + $1m for an oversight team and a board consisting of a few people = $7m/year.
Median price of an acquisition = Cost of a missed opportunity = $50m (2005 avg.)
One single idea bankrolled into a successful product = Guaranteed funding for the next 50 new product ideas.